Thursday, July 12, 2007

Headteacher Crisis

"A headmaster is believed to have committed suicide on the eve of an inspection of his school by Ofsted.

Jed Holmes, who was in his fifties, was found dead at his home in Peterborough by a colleague from Hampton Hargate Primary School at about 10am yesterday.

Mr Holmes had recently been off work with stress." (Daily Telegraph 12.7.07)

An appalling tragedy.

We've blogged the mounting crisis among state school headteachers many times (eg here). In a recent survey, getting on for half of them report themselves as "highly stressed", and this is not the first such suicide.

Unsurprisingly, they're leaving in droves (eg see this blog), and there is a serious problem replacing them. When last sighted, 1200 state secondary schools were without a permanent head.

To be a state school headteacher is to be the meat in a particularly unappetising middle management sandwich. Responsible for results to both parents and politicos, you don't actually have the power to do the job. That's all retained by the self-appointed education "experts" up in Whitehall.

Responsibility without power- a surefire recipe for stress, and worse.

In the independent sector they do things very differently. Yes, headteachers are still under pressure to deliver, but they only have one set of customers- the paying parents. And unlike their state school counterparts, they have retained the authority to do the job.

PSToday's top-down schools headline grabber is yet another spin of the curriculum dials. In a classic of doublespeak, the new Children, Schools and Families Commissar Balls says: "We've stripped it (the curriculum) down so that there's flexibility, more capacity for personalised learning, more capacity to drive up performance for individual schools and the nation, with teachers shaping it in classrooms. This is not meddling, this is much greater freedom - but with certain clear things prescribed." How very clear.

BOM the book now available

Drawing on six years of blogging government waste, this book shows how we spend far more than we need on our public services. It sets out the facts and explores the underlying issues. Just why does government spend so much and deliver such second rate service? Why do we put up with it? And what are the alternatives?

ABOUT BOM

Despite all the talk of cuts, government still consumes nearly half our national income. Yet many tens of billions of its spending is wasted, with taxpayers made to pick up the tab for a depressing array of overpriced sub-standard services. This is money we can no longer afford, and our National Debt is already at danger level.

If we're to avoid further decades of stagnation and austerity we urgently need to find another way. Exposing and understanding the wastefulness of government is a necessary step in the right direction.